Baseband upgrade benefits?

I've been wondering about this for awhile. The iPhone 4 had a pretty good number of problems with cellular connectivity upon release, and several in-depth articles noted specific difficulty handling tower handoffs. At least in the radios I design, this code lives in the baseband software.

Everyone's always trying to keep their early baseband to preserve the unlock, but it seems like there could be valid reasons for wanting to upgrade the baseband as well. Cellular connectivity improvements could very well be among those reasons.

With an unlock for newer basebands supposedly under development, I wonder if it might be best to take the baseband improvements provided by 4.1 and hope for an unlock later. I'm on AT&T in the US, so I don't need the unlock, but it is nice to maintain for resale value.

I've had similar thoughts as well. It sure would be nice if Apple released changelogs for their baseband updates, but I can't imagine that happening anytime soon.

First, though, I'd like to point out that the people who are actually USING the unlock, and not just keeping the old baseband around for future potential unlock use and resale value, would be completely screwed and have their fancy iPhone reduced to an iPod for a time if they took your advice to update now and hope for an unlock later.

I'm not one of those. I'm an AT&T subscriber in the U.S., and I rarely travel outside the country, so I really don't need the unlock. It is, of course, nice to know that it is around should I ever be in a fix, though.

But that's not the reason that I don't update my baseband. I would be hesitant to do so even if I knew that there was an unlock coming or one already out for the newer versions. And here's why: Apple has removed my CHOICE to downgrade should I ever find that I need to. So it is easier to stick with the devil I know. If there were gobs of third-party experiential evidence that showed the newest baseband operated noticeably better than the older one(s), or if the older baseband had a showstopping bug that was fixed in a later version, then I would have no problem jumping aboard the baseband update train, unlock or not. But neither has happened, so I am content to stick with the old baseband. My 3GS with iOS 4 still has the original 04.26.08 baseband on it, even.

I've ranted before on these forums about why I jailbreak my iPhone and the stupidity of code signing and forcing everybody to use the App Store as their only means to load on 3rd-party code, but nothing has angered me more than Apple's downgrade prevention tactics. I understand WHY they do it: to prevent people from going back to old code after people have discovered how to either root/jailbreak or unlock it. But that doesn't justify it; not by a longshot.

The fact is, Apple can make mistakes, too. Just because it is an upgrade doesn't mean that it is better. Has everybody REALLY already forgotten the horrible "coma bug" in iOS 3.1(.1) and how people who were affected by it had to wait an entire month before Apple came out with a fix for it in 3.1.2? They could have done the right thing and allowed affected people to downgrade back to 3.0.1, but NOOOO. They forced their customers to live with it.

Or what if Apple decides to remove functionality that you were dependent on in future versions? 1st-gen iPod touch users got a taste of this when Apple opened up the use of dock-connector microphones in iOS 3.0, only to have it yanked/crippled in 3.1.x. Maybe the fact that they worked at all in 3.0 was an unintended fluke or accident on Apple's part, which just makes the feature removal all the worse: Apple did it out of spite.

Another great example is how much of a dog iOS 4.0 was on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd-gen. Fortunately for users of those devices, Apple had not built downgrade prevention into the hardware of those models, so people could go back to 3.1.3 if they wanted to, while they waited for 4.1 to be released. But imagine if iOS 4.0 had also turned out to be a dog for 3GS. Sorry, but until 4.1 came out, you'd have been screwed.

Granted, these aren't examples of bugs or feature cripple in the baseband itself, but the same principles are at work: if I knew I could return to older code at any time, even without an unlock, I would GLADLY upgrade. But because I can't -- because that choice has been taken from me -- sorry, but I'm out.

I mean, seriously: we wouldn't stand for this if it were happening on our PCs. When Leopard came out, the perception was that initially it had some performance issues that needed to be worked through, and some apps that people used still needed to be updated for compatibility with the new OS. So some people tried out Leopard for a time, and then downgraded back to Tiger while they waited for the issues to be worked out. In the meantime, their computer worked just as well as it did before, their productivity wasn't being hampered, and the users weren't being "punished" for being early adopters. Same thing in the Windows world: if Microsoft releases a Hotfix or a service pack for Windows that breaks stuff, you take a moment to go "WTF, Microsoft?!" but then you roll back the patch and go on your merry way! Or, an even more striking example: when Vista came out, those who tried it and hated it could still go back to XP if they chose to! Microsoft didn't say, "haha, suckers! If you had stayed with XP, you could still be using it today, but because you already upgraded to Vista, it's too late!"

...but that is exactly, exactly what Apple does with software on their iDevices. And it Pisses. Me. Off.

So, no, until there is a way to safely "roll it back," I will not be updating my basebands as long as I am given the option to keep the older ones.

MuscleNerd has been pretty clear in the past that most baseband upgrades don't really improve anything. Certainly for the iPhone 3GS and 3G the baseband has been pretty stable for a long time and the only "improvements" have been to plug the holes used by ultrasn0w and other unlocks.

My next vacation wont be until January-February... is the 4.2 Jailbreak and (hopefully) the unlock coming out along with the official Apple release of iOs4.2?
does anyone know?

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Chances are it'll take a month or two AFTER 4,2 is released for an unlock to appear. Since 4,2 is scheduled for sometime in November, if you take your vacation in mid to late February you might be okay.

It's not so much the Question itself people ask is the problem, it's how they paraphrase it, seems like that's where your frustrations are coming from.

The fact is: Peeps on these forums come from very different levels of knowledge regarding the Jailbreaking/Developing community.

The spectrum goes from the casual, clueless iPhone owner...For example the guy who posts: "I just found out about this thing called "jailbreaking" so how do I do this?...Oops I think I F'ed up....help.. whadya mean 'Now I have to wait' for how long?"

To the opposite side of the spectrum: The Inspiring hacker who follows every single person in the Jailbreaking community on their Twitter and is always reporting back within seconds what these "Hacker" Rock stars post on their Tweets with exciting news etc.

So I'm guessing when someone asks "So when will the unlock come out for baseband 2.10.xx ??" They are merely asking this ...

"Hey for those of you in here that are 'in the know' with the Dev team, jailbreaking community etc. Have you guys by any chance read something from a reliable source if there is an unlock in the works for the 2.10.xx baseband? Has the Dev Team reported if they have something but are holding it back until the next major iOS release? Does anyone know?"

The above paragraph will be something more sensible to ask than to simply ask: "So what are the chances of a 2.10.04 Unlock anytime soon?"

But I am going to just give those people who ask that "annoying" question the benefit of the doubt that they are simple asking about something that they assume the more "dedicated" on these forums know.

In this case..Daiden (most likely someone who follows the Dev Team/JB community closely) very well understood my needs and gave me a Crystal Clear Answer (to the best of his knowledge) that I pretty much was looking for.

Chances are it'll take a month or two AFTER 4,2 is released for an unlock to appear. Since 4,2 is scheduled for sometime in November, if you take your vacation in mid to late February you might be okay.

MuscleNerd has been pretty clear in the past that most baseband upgrades don't really improve anything. Certainly for the iPhone 3GS and 3G the baseband has been pretty stable for a long time and the only "improvements" have been to plug the holes used by ultrasn0w and other unlocks.

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That may be true, but the 3GS didn't have the baseband problems the iPhone 4 has/had. While Musclenerd is surely more knowledgeable than I on this topic, without code or a changelog, to me it seems impossible for him to know that no improvements were made.

That may be true, but the 3GS didn't have the baseband problems the iPhone 4 has/had. While Musclenerd is surely more knowledgeable than I on this topic, without code or a changelog, to me it seems impossible for him to know that no improvements were made.

In any case, I just thought it was an interesting topic.

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What? Baseband issues? iPhone4 has reception issues due to the antenna design, not a different baseband.

Before the antenna issue blew up, there were a number of articles regarding the iPhone 4's handling of the tower handoff and tower selection process. There was some blame placed upon the Infineon baseband modem in the iPhone 4, but in the iPhone 4 launch presentation Jobs also mentioned they made the cellular handling more intelligent, so there was some suspicion that blame lied there. I specifically recall Apple noting that sometimes the "best" tower to connect to was not necessarily the one with the highest signal strength, which is an algorithm that could be updated through baseband improvements. Note that the launch of basically every iPhone since the 3G has had similar tower connectivity problems, which users claim were resolved or went away as time went on. This could be explained by baseband/software upgrades.

In any case, the media frenzy over the antenna has made finding the links difficult now, and Intel buying Infineon doesn't help, either. I'll try to find them when I have more time tonight.

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